Checking Email Less Often Leads to More Productive Workdays

Do you remember the first time you saw a headline that was basically that?

1997, I'm riding BART to SF, like 20/yr old, reading a similar article in this rag called Wired.

Wasn't it about Slack last year tho?

I check my email once (or zero times) a day, slack 2 or 3 times.

People bug me about not getting their emails occasionally, but I'm busy actually getting shit done.

My team knows if it's important, than can just interrupt me. We all work right next to each other -- open office -- it's not a big deal.

I don't know how anyone could get a lot of work done, while responding to dozens of messages and emails promptly. That's a full time job in and of itself.

I have had to point out to colleagues that I might always check mail when I come in and again at lunch time.

But if I am engaged in a task I might not look at mail for several hours.

Knowing a fact is one thing, but incorporating said fact into your life such that you live it and reap the rewards is another.

This just in! Fire is hot, water is wet! More at eleven.

Why don't you care about your own productivity? Part of the agreement you struck with your employer is that you provide value, don't you want to provide that value?

This is the news site for Y Combinator, a startup accelerator. Anyone interested in startups should also be interested in how to build a culture that's conducive to happy, productive employees, because startups that do that will probably have a better shot at success.

Yes, especially given that many of us spend 25% of our day on HN and Reddit...

I think 99% of us would love to be able to get into flowstate and actually get chunks of work done.

I want to work better for my own pride, not to make my employer happy. I want to do better work because it makes me feel good at the end of the day, not because it adds to someone else’s bottom line; that it does so is a happy side-effect.

That said, if you’re working for “an employer” and you don’t give a shit about them or the job, you should find something else to do. You seem happy enough to take their money?

I see high productivity as a vehicle that allows me to stand out amongst my peers without working 80 hours a week.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I get genuinely depressed if I don't feel like I accomplished much at the end of the day.

I have never gone home at the end of the day and said "man, I wish I could have spent more time checking email today".

Surely that counts as more productive work day? ;)

I work for a megacorp (~250,000 emloyees) - the level of spam messages it puts out every day to all employees is honestly just staggering. I guess I average 7 such emails a day, never mind a week.

Just as bad, is many of them are repeated, over and over again - some every few days for a while, some every week in perpetuity.

And even worse is that every single company email that goes out is an image. And I don't mean contains images - the actual email body is a single image with crappy 90's graphics and rendered text! On the odd occasion where you want to copy and paste, you're out of luck.

I've got several Exchange rules set up to put them in a "Cruft" folder, but new ones keep popping up, and every once in a while it catches a "real" email, so I still need to check it from time to time.

/rant

Similar situation here. I didn't even check my email today. If there is something important I will be notified, either automatically or by a slack mention/direct-message.

If you are waiting at your desk for a reply and are truly blocked have you considered getting out of your desk to ask in person or similarly phoning them?

If you truly aren’t blocked then what’s the problem waiting a few hours?

I do wonder (and I'm not accusing you specifically) how much people conflate their own productivity with the team's productivity. a particular engineer's productivity is undoubtedly harmed by interruptions, but you can indirectly accomplish a lot just by unblocking several junior engineers in an afternoon. I'm fortunate to work at a company where senior/lead devs get part of the credit when they facilitate someone else's work.

I agree with your point completely. What are we measuring? Some people's work is intended only to make other people more productive. Knowledge work can't have everyone 100% isolated to get 100% productivity. This is a sliding scale and where good managers get paid for maximizing their team's productivity.

I was about to post something similar. Let's say, as a conservative estimate, a manager oversees 5 ICs. Let's also assume, generously, that the manager becomes 50% more productive if he or she doesn't reply to e-mails until the end of the day. If the "overflow" from that strategy causes the ICs to become even 5% less productive, the gain in the manager's productivity is more than wiped out, and the team as a whole is worse off.

A large part of a manager's job is to shield his or her team from e-mails, Slack messages, and other productivity-sapping interruptions. If a manager is grading him or herself by their individual productivity, they're doing management wrong. If an organization is grading its managers by their individual productivity, rather than whether their teams are meeting their objectives, the organization is doing management wrong.

Emails are one medium to support my team. They're not suitable for a rapid response to anything. If something is that urgent it warrants an in-person conversation or video conference.

E-mails are great for medium to large scale logistics and status communication: organizing meetings, ensuring participants have access to necessary documentation, and communicating the status of some on going project.